Canva enables creativity with AI

Our Executive Function series features perspectives from leaders driving transformation through AI.

Launched in 2013, Canva is an online design and visual communication platform with a mission to empower everyone in the world to design anything and publish anywhere.

We spoke with Cameron Adams about Canva’s evolution, AI powering more end-to-end workflows, and enabling the creative process with new AI-powered tools.

As a successful tech company, Canva continuously adapts to changing user needs and emerging trends by embracing new technologies to stay at the forefront. Our mission to empower the world to design remains technology-agnostic, allowing us to leverage the best available tools to fulfill that goal.

The rise of AI is particularly exciting for us because it allows us to fulfill our mission for our users more efficiently and powerfully.

Initially, AI played a role in more specialized applications, like our background removal tool, which lets users remove backgrounds from images with a single click. Now, with the advent of large language models (LLMs) and agents, we're seeing AI tackle larger, more complex tasks, allowing for true human-AI collaboration.

This shift from specific, granular use cases to more holistic workflows has opened up new possibilities. Our users can now collaborate with AI to create, iterate, and refine their ideas—from the initial brainstorming stages all the way to the final product, whether it's a video, website, or presentation. This partnership between humans and AI is a transformative development for us.

A few years ago, we launched the "Visual Suite," which expanded Canva beyond its traditional perception as just a marketing or social media tool. It enabled users to bring an idea or goal to life through a variety of tools, such as whiteboards for brainstorming, documents for refining ideas, presentations for sharing concepts, videos for communication, and even websites to showcase those ideas to the world.

AI is increasingly playing a larger role in this entire workflow. Initially, we used AI to simplify tasks—like automatically sorting sticky notes on a whiteboard or removing backgrounds from images. But now, AI is beginning to connect the entire creative process, from idea generation to final presentation.

We see this as furthering the same vision we’ve had from the start, which is to make design and creativity more accessible to anyone. Generating entire, editable designs on Canva offers a fresh start to help people express their ideas quickly and get to a polished end result sooner. Our AI product strategy offers the best of both worlds - a powerful generative AI experience for designs, images, text and more - as well as a full end-to-end workflow where you can manually edit each part of what you generate, collaborate on it with your team, and publish nearly anywhere, without ever leaving Canva.

We’ve been able to rapidly expand what’s possible with AI on Canva in three main ways: by researching and building our own design AI technology, by leveraging powerful collaborations, and by offering an expansive ecosystem. Alongside our own AI research, we integrate AI into Canva through our work with companies like OpenAI and Leonardo.Ai. For example, with Magic Design, we tie together LLM prompting with our own design model to generate a unique design that our users can then edit for the critical last mile.

Our ecosystem also plays a key role. With 225 million active users, we’ve built a marketplace where developers can create AI-powered apps that integrate seamlessly into Canva. These apps range from AI presenters to music generators, offering a wide array of tools that users can use directly in their designs.

Internally, we've rolled out a program called "AI Everywhere" to get everyone at Canva up to speed with the capabilities of AI. This involves providing access to the best AI tools and encouraging experimentation across different teams. For example, our engineering team uses tools like Cursor, which helps them code more efficiently, while our finance team uses a different set of tools.

We also foster creativity and encourage experimentation through company-wide AI hackathons, where teams solve big problems without the pressure of traditional workflows. The key is to help teams spot the right tools for their needs and give them the space to experiment.

For our customers, we view AI as integral to the creative process in three ways: exploration, outcomes, and speed.

The early stages of the creative process, like brainstorming or creating concept art, are now accelerated and democratized so that anyone with an idea can come up with a visual that helps get others on board.

AI then enables more precise and high-quality outputs by allowing users to make pixel-level edits, previously only achievable by those with the skills and the time. And then AI streamlines the creative workflow, allowing designers to allocate more time to strategic and conceptual aspects of their work, ultimately increasing overall efficiency.

Throughout these advancements we always place people at the centre of creativity and enable them to kickstart and control any ideas they want to bring to life.

There’s still a lot to explore, but the value of AI is now undeniable. It’s no longer a question of whether you should invest and experiment within AI; it’s a given. Companies that embrace AI will outperform those that don’t.

From a recent Canva survey, 78% of marketing leaders said they see AI as a critical part of their long-term strategy. Moreover, 82% said AI frees them up to focus on more exciting and creative work. These statistics show that AI is not just about efficiency; it's also enhancing job satisfaction and creativity.

We're starting to see AI-native creatives emerge—people who don't have the same limitations or preconceived notions as those who learned to create before AI existed. For example, I recently saw my 11-year old son quickly bring an idea for an app to life using AI without having to worry about the technical details. He wasn’t concerned with coding languages or bugs; he was just focused on bringing his idea to life. This is the power of AI—it's allowing creators to be more innovative without being held back by technical hurdles.

In music, AI is already allowing solo artists to create high-quality compositions that would traditionally require a large team and studio. AI-driven tools are enabling musicians to produce complex work in their bedrooms. I believe we’re very close to a moment where AI influences in music, whether in composition, instrumentation, or lyrics, could be recognized as part of the creative process, just like any other tool or instrument.

Building a successful business still relies on understanding your customer and solving meaningful problems. AI can make things easier, but it doesn't eliminate the challenges of building a successful business. There will inevitably be a lot of ups and downs in a successful startup journey, and to get you through that rollercoaster your business needs to have a fundamental connection to something you're passionate about.

It's about finding the right problem to solve and ensuring there's a real customer base that will benefit from your solution. Ultimately, passion and persistence are just as important as the technology you use.

Canva uses OpenAI’s APIs to build parts of  Magic Studio, a suite of AI products which make it easy to  turn words, visuals, and ideas into extraordinary designs. Canva also uses ChatGPT Enterprise across the company. OpenAI and Canva are working together to make design innovation accessible to all.